Sony has teamed with Cogitai, an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up focused on next generation technologies. Specifically, Sony has invested in Cogitai and the two companies plan to collaborate towards the development of AI technologies using deep reinforcement learning with prediction technology that could be used as the basis for the next generation of AI applications and products.

Cogitai was founded in September 2015 by three AI researchers, Mark Ring (CEO of Cogitai, and a pioneer in continual learning and reinforcement learning), Peter Stone (President and COO of Cogitai, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and specialist in reinforcement learning, multiagent systems and robotics), and Satinder Singh Baveja (Chief Scientist and CTO of Cogitai, a professor at the University of Michigan, with interests in reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivation, and the combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning). The company aims to develop AI technology that empowers machines to learn continually from interaction with the real world, enabling everyday things that sense and act to get smarter, more skilled, and more knowledgeable with experience. In addition to its founders, Cogitai has also assembled a "Brain Trust" consisting of a number of the world's best academics in AI, who will be actively engaged in technology development.

Sony and Cogitai both consider the next challenge for AI to be the creation of systems that can autonomously and continually learn from experience –autonomous cognitive development systems (or continual learning systems) that exhibit flexible competence and can learn to react properly in a wide variety of task domains.

These systems will allow machines to autonomously build up their own knowledge and skills from interactive experience with the real world, and then to share and extend their knowledge, skills and understanding with each other.